Turkish Prime Minister rebuked the U.N. Security Council for inaction over Syria, saying the world body of superpowers was repeating mistakes that led to massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s.

World Bulletin/News Desk

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that the United Nations (UN) must be reformed on justice.

Delivering a speech at the Istanbul World Forum, Erdogan said that structural injustice was clearly seen in functioning of several international organizations especially the UN.

"It is time to change structures of international organizations especially the UN Security Council," he said.

The UN Security Council did not intervene in human tragedy in Syria which has been continuing for 20 months, he said, noting that at least 30,000 people have been killed in Syria so far. The Council could not pursue an effective policy in regard to incidents in Syria, he said.

Premier Erdogan said that Syrian people deserved justice.

Turkey has been pursuing a policy complying with justice regarding this issue from the very beginning, he said.

"The UN is losing its credibility by turning a blind eye to what is happening in Syria," Erdogan said describing the situation in the country torn by internal political crisis as a human tragedy.

Erdogan said a system which allowed one or two nations to block intervention in such a massive humanitarian crisis was inherently unjust, and that Syria would go down in history as a U.N. failure much like Bosnia in the 1990s.

"How sad is that the United Nations is as helpless today as it was 20 years go when it watched the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in the Balkans, Bosnia and Srebrenica," Erdogan told the Istanbul conference.

The July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica was the worst on European soil since World War Two, in which Dutch U.N. peacekeepers abandoned what had been designated a U.N. safe haven to advancing Bosnian Serb forces, who then killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys and bulldozed their corpses into pits.

Turkish officials had expressed hope they might be able to persuade Moscow, which sold Syria $1 billion of arms last year, to soften its strident opposition at the Security Council and that if it succeeded, China would follow suit.

The 20-month-old Syrian uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has claimed up to 20,000 lives according to UN estimates. More than 230,000 have become refugees with around three million in need of humanitarian assistance.

Erdogan has repeatedly called on Assad to step down accusing him of murdering his own people. Turkey has allegedly been supplying Syrian rebels with weaponry.

Tensions between Damascus and Ankara escalated in October after an artillery shell allegedly fired by the Syrian army landed in a Turkish border village killing five and injuring 11 local residents.

In response, the Turkish parliament authorized the government to launch cross-border military operations as a deterrent against potential attacks from Syria for the period of one year.

Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN and Arab League envoy for Syria, is expected to hold talks in Turkey on Saturday to learn Turkey's view of the situation as the escalation of tensions between Damascus and Ankara has fueled fears that the violent conflict in Syria may drag other countries into a regional war.

Legal Notice: Copyright, trade marks and other intellectual property rights in this website can not be reproduced without the prior permission.